The Origins of the Idea of ‘Latin’ America

It has been the conventional wisdom of the past several decades, since the publication in 1968 of John Leddy Phelan's influential essay, ‘Pan-Latinism, French Intervention in Mexico (1861–7) and the Genesis of the Idea of Latin America’, that ‘Latin America’ was originally a French concept, l'Amérique latine, used by French intellectuals to justify French imperialism in Mexico under Napoleon III.Footnote ¹ There existed, the French argued, a linguistic and cultural affinity, a unity, of ‘Latin’ peoples for whom France was the natural leader and inspiration (and their defender against Anglo-Saxon, mainly US, influence and, ultimately, domination). The idea of a race latine, different from the Anglo-Saxon ‘race’, was first conceptualised in Lettres sur l'Amérique du Nord (2 vols., Paris, 1836) by Michel Chevalier (1806–79). After a lengthy stay in the United States (1833–35), in the footsteps of Alexis de Tocqueville, Chevalier had visited Mexico and Cuba. He later became a prominent member of the Collège de France, the Council of State and the Senate, and a close advisor to Napoleon III. He was the principal apologist for French intervention in Mexico in 1861 in, for example, the articles he wrote for the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1862 and in Le Méxique ancien et moderne (1863). But the first use of the expression l'Amérique latine known to Phelan was by L. M. Tisserand in an article entitled ‘Situation de la latinité’, published in the Revue des Races Latines in January 1861.

In fact, a number of Spanish American writers and intellectuals – many of them, it is true, resident in Paris – had used the expression ‘América Latina’ several years earlier. For its very first use there are three principal candidates: José María Torres Caicedo, a Colombian journalist, poet and critic (1830–89); Francisco Bilbao, a Chilean socialist intellectual (1823–65); and Justo Arosemena, a Panamanian/Colombian jurist, politician, sociologist and diplomat (1817–96).

In 1856 Torres Caicedo wrote a long poem entitled ‘Las dos Américas’ which was published in El Correo de Ultramar, a Spanish-language newspaper published in Paris, in February 1857. Along with several references to ‘América del Sur’ and ‘América española’, and ending with a passionate call for the unity of the ‘Pueblos del Sur’ against ‘América en el Norte’, it included the lines:

Torres Caicedo went on to publish Bases para la formación de una liga latinoamericana (Paris, 1861) and Unión latinoamericana (Paris, 1865), and in Paris in 1866, in an homenaje to the Argentine liberator José de San Martín, to whom all ‘latinoamericanos’ owed a profound debt, he declared: ‘Para mí, colombiano, que amo con entusiasmo mi noble patria, existe una patria más grande – la América latina’.Footnote ² Bilbao organised a Movimiento Social de los Pueblos de la América Meridional in Brussels in 1856, and in a speech in Paris to some 30 citizens belonging to ‘casi todas las Repúblicas del Sur’ on 22 June 1856 he offered his reflections on ‘la raza latinoamericana’ and ‘la unidad latinoamericana’. The speech was later published as a 32-page pamphlet, Iniciativa de la América: idea de un Congreso Federal de las repúblicas (Paris, 1856).Footnote ³ Arosemena, the Liberal representative for the state of Panama in the Colombian senate at the time, referred to ‘América Latina’ and ‘el interés latinoamericano’ in a speech in Bogotá on 20 July 1856, in articles published in El Neogranadino on 15 and 29 July 1856 (‘La cuestión americana i su importancia’) and later in Estudios sobre la idea de una liga americana (Lima, 1864).Footnote ⁴ A number of Spanish liberal intellectuals, Emilio Castelar (1832–99) and Francisco Pi y Margall (1824–1901) for example, began to refer to ‘América Latina’ at this time.Footnote ⁵ Carlos Calvo, an Argentine historian and international lawyer (1824–1906), was probably the first to use the expression in academic works: Colección completa de los tratados, convenciones, capitulaciones, armisticios y otros actos diplomáticos de todos los estados de la América Latina (20 vols., Paris, 1862–4) and Anales históricos de la revolución de la América Latina desde el año 1808 (3 vols., Paris, 1864–7).Footnote ⁶

Despite the fragmentation of Spanish America into ten republics at the time of independence from Spain (by mid-century there were 16), Spanish American intellectuals and writers in the 1850s and 1860s sustained the idea, earlier advanced not only by Simón Bolívar but most notably by Andrés Bello, of a common Spanish American consciousness and identity that was stronger than local and regional ‘nationalisms’. Like Michel Chevalier, they maintained that ‘América Latina’ was fundamentally different from the United States, the ‘other’ America.Footnote ⁷ Most importantly, they also felt that the United States was their enemy. The annexation of Texas in 1845, the Mexican War (1846–8), the Californian gold rush, US interest in an inter-oceanic route across the isthmus of Panama, the constant threats to occupy and annex Cuba and, especially, William Walker's invasion of Nicaragua in 1855 all confirmed their belief that the United States could only fulfil its Manifest Destiny at the expense of ‘América Latina’. In the 1860s, as a result of France's intervention in Mexico in 1861, Spain's annexation of Santo Domingo in 1861–5, and the latter's wars with Peru (1864–6) and Chile (1865–6), France and Spain joined the United States as the enemy. It was for this reason that some Spanish Americans preferred to see themselves as part of ‘América Española’, ‘Hispanoamérica’ or simply ‘América del Sur’ rather than ‘América Latina’. For them, latinidad represented conservatism, anti-liberalism, anti-republicanism, Catholicism and, not least, ties to Latin Europe – that is to say, to France and Spain.

In the history of the emergence of the idea of a common Spanish American or Latin American identity in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, Argentina represents an interesting case apart. The post-independence generation of writers, political thinkers and liberal intellectuals there, the so-called Generation of ‘37, of whom Esteban Echeverría (1805–51), Juan Bautista Alberdi (1810–84) and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811–88) were the most prominent, regarded Argentina, and especially Buenos Aires, as the embodiment of European civilisation in a predominantly barbarous Spanish American environment. They were influenced primarily by English, French and North American ideas and believed that Argentina had the potential to become South America's United States. For Alberdi the United States was ‘the model of the universe’, for Sarmiento ‘the highest point of civilisation thus far attained’. They had little interest in the rest of Spanish America, except when offering themselves as guides and mentors, and rarely, it seems, used the term ‘América Latina’. And they did not, for example, denounce either US or French intervention in Mexico. Only the early ‘nationalists’, like Alberdi (after he distanced himself from Mitre and Sarmiento), Carlos Guido y Spano (for whom Argentina was one ‘American state’ among many ‘sister republics’), José Hernández, and Olegario V. Andrade (author of the poem ‘Atlántida: canto al porvenir de la raza latina en América’ in the late 1870s), demonstrated what Nicolas Shumway described as ‘unabashed – and for Argentina unusual – identification with other countries of Spanish America’.Footnote ⁸

The point to be emphasised here is that none of the Spanish American intellectuals and writers who first used the expression ‘América Latina’, nor their French or Spanish counterparts, thought that it included Brazil. ‘América Latina’ was simply another name for ‘America Española’.

For their part, Brazilian writers and intellectuals, while conscious that Brazil shared with Spanish America a common Iberian and Catholic background, were also aware of what separated Brazil from Spanish America: geography, history (Portugal's long struggle to maintain its independence from Spain and the different colonial experiences of Portuguese America and Spanish America), an economy and society based on plantation agriculture and African slavery and, above all, language, culture and political institutions. Unlike Spanish America, Brazil had secured its independence relatively peacefully and had remained united under a monarchy. Brazil was politically stable and ‘civilised’, in contrast to what Brazilians regarded as the violent, extremely unstable and ‘barbarous’ Spanish American republics. And in its literature, whether the poetry of Antônio Gonçalves Dias or the novels of José de Alencar, as well as in its art and music, Brazilian romanticism was different from that of Spanish America.Footnote ⁹

Insofar as Brazilian writers and intellectuals thought about the world beyond Brazil, it was not to Spanish America they looked – they certainly did not see themselves as part of ‘América Latina’ – but to Europe, especially France, or in rare cases, to America as a whole, including the United States. It was the common Indian heritage of the Americas that captured the imagination of Antônio Carlos Gomes, for example, in his opera Il Guarany (1870); that inspired Joaquim Manuel de Souza Andrade, known as Sousândrade (1833–1902), in his dramatic poem about a legendary Colombian Indian, O guesa errante, written in New York in the 1870s; and that influenced Machado de Assis in Americanas (1875), his third published volume of poems.

Republican intellectuals were particularly attracted to the United States. The republican manifesto of 1870 began with the famous words: ‘Somos da América e queremos ser americanos’. For republicans, Brazil was ‘um país isolado’, unfortunately separated from the Spanish American republics not only by geography, history, language and culture, but above all, from their point of view, by its imperial/monarchical form of government. This also separated Brazil from the United States, however. Republicans felt that Brazil should become less politically and culturally isolated from Spanish America, but also from the United States.

Brazil and Conferences for American Unity in the Nineteenth Century

During the early part of the nineteenth century, US politicians, President Thomas Jefferson and Senator Henry Clay in particular, had elaborated the idea of the ‘western hemisphere’, America or the Americas, independent of Europe – and, above all, republican.Footnote ¹⁰ In his many conversations with his friend, the Abbé Correa da Serra, who in 1816 was named minister of the United Kingdom of Portugal and Brazil in the United States, Jefferson included Brazil, not yet independent and not to become a republic until 1889, as a key element in his ‘American system’.Footnote ¹¹ President James Monroe, in his so-called Doctrine of December 1823, declared that the United States would not tolerate any extension of the European political system or any intervention by any European power ‘in any portion of this hemisphere’. It was, however, as is well known, a largely rhetorical declaration: it was the British navy, not the United States, that kept the reactionary powers of Europe out of the western hemisphere at this time. Nevertheless, George Canning, the British foreign secretary, expressed some concern about ‘the avowed pretension of the United States to put themselves at the head of a confederacy of all the Americas and to sway that confederation against Europe (Great Britain included)’.Footnote ¹² John Quincy Adams, Monroe's secretary of state and successor as president, while equally opposed to European influence in the Americas, had no interest in any ‘American system’ which included former Spanish and Portuguese colonies, however. Such colonies were not only Iberian and, worse, Catholic, but inherently unstable and degenerate, not least, he thought, because of their tropical climate. ‘As to an American system’, Adams wrote, ‘we have it; we constitute the whole of it.’ He had ‘little expectation of any beneficial result to this country [the United States] from any future connection with them [the newly independent Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries], political or commercial’.Footnote ¹³ And for the next 60 years no US president showed much interest in the ‘western hemisphere’ idea or indeed in any part of the hemisphere south of Panama.

Politicians in Spanish America at the time of independence, and notably Simón Bolívar himself (most famously in the Jamaica Letter of 1815), had a vision of a confederation of Spanish American republics, forming a ‘single nation’, with a common policy towards the European enemy, and keeping the United States at arm's length. In December 1824 Bolívar invited representatives of all the peoples and governments of America, except the United States, Haiti and Brazil, to a congress in Panama ‘to arrange our American affairs’. Thus, it was not only the United States which Bolivar believed should be kept at arm's length, but also Brazil, which was not initially invited to Panama. Its language, history and culture were entirely foreign, so Bolívar believed. Its economy and society were based on the slave trade and slavery, which had been repudiated, if not yet entirely abolished, in most of the Spanish American republics. Moreover, Brazil remained part of the Europe he despised and feared, not least because it had maintained the monarchical system of government. Worse still, it called itself an empire, and had imperialist ambitions in the Río de la Plata.Footnote ¹⁴

The Panama Congress of June–July 1826 was a failure. Not all the Spanish American states sent delegates, and only Gran Colombia ratified the treaty of perpetual alliance. The various later attempts to create an American confederation, at conferences in Lima (1847–8), Santiago de Chile (1856), Washington (1856), Lima again (1864–5) and Caracas (1883, the centenary of Bolívar's birth), in order better to resist the territorial expansion of the United States and, in the 1860s, French and Spanish interventions, were all failures. And the Spanish American republics remained suspicious of imperial Brazil, their huge Portuguese-speaking neighbour which occupied half of South America. On the few occasions when one or other of them considered inviting Brazil to participate in their American conferences, the invitations extended were unofficial, lukewarm and ambivalent. None of them were accepted.Footnote ¹⁵

The Brazilian governments of the Second Empire (1840–89) did not identify with any of the various projects of its neighbours for inter-American unity. With its immense Atlantic coastline, Brazil was firmly part of the Atlantic world; its principal economic and political links were with Great Britain, and its cultural links with France and, to a lesser extent, Portugal. Moreover, unlike many of the Spanish American republics, Brazil did not feel threatened by the United States, even less by France and Spain. Relations between Brazil and its Spanish American neighbours in what Brazilian diplomats referred to as ‘América Espanhola’ or ‘América Meridional’ or simply ‘América do Sul’ were extremely limited in this period, with one notable exception: the Río de la Plata, where Brazil, like Portugal in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, had strategic interests.Footnote ¹⁶ Brazil fought three wars there: the first against the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata for control of the Banda Oriental, which resulted in the independence of Uruguay, between 1825 and 1828; the second against the Argentine dictator, Juan Manuel de Rosas, in alliance with the Argentine province of Entre Ríos and Uruguay, in 1851–2; and the third, in alliance with Argentina and Uruguay, against the Paraguayan dictator, Francisco Solano López – the Paraguayan War of 1864–70.

Spanish America, Brazil and the United States at the Turn of the Century

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed the emergence of the United States as a regional power. The famous remark of Secretary of State Richard Olney during the Venezuelan crisis of 1895 (‘The United States is practically sovereign on this continent and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition’), the war with Spain (1898) and the subsequent occupation of Cuba and Puerto Rico, the independence of Panama (1903), Theodore Roosevelt's Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine (December 1904), US intervention in the Dominican Republic (1905) and Mexico (1914–15), and the US occupation of Nicaragua (1912–33), Haiti (1915–34) and the Dominican Republic (1916–24), all attested to the growing assertion of US hegemony in Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, if not yet in South America. At same time, the United States promoted the idea of pan-Americanism, with its emphasis on a shared American geography and history and shared American ideas of republicanism, liberty and democracy (sic), and made a first attempt to institutionalise the idea of the western hemisphere, the Americas, separate from Europe, in a series of international conferences of American states (usually referred to as the Pan-American Conferences).Footnote ¹⁷ The aim was to promote US trade and investment throughout the region, to create more orderly and predictable political structures in the countries to the south, and to assert US leadership peacefully in the western hemisphere, while at the same time deterring any lingering European imperialist ambitions there.

The governments of Spanish America generally reacted to this new US interest in the hemisphere with suspicion and mistrust. They strongly condemned, in particular, the war with Spain and the establishment of the US protectorate in Cuba, the extension of the Monroe Doctrine, and US interventions in Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. They feared, with good reason, that pan-Americanism was simply a weapon with which to assert US economic and political hegemony for the further exploitation of the region. Brazil, however, which became a republic in 1889, sought to develop closer relations with the United States and was from the beginning an enthusiastic supporter of pan-Americanism.

The Brazilian governments of the First Republic (1889–1930), like the governments of the Empire, showed no great interest in ‘os povos da língua espanhol’, ‘as nações latinoamericanas’, except for their (generally successful) efforts to resolve, by negotiation and, if necessary, arbitration, the frontier disputes with their immediate neighbours in South America, notably Argentina in 1895 and Bolivia (over Acre) in 1903, but also Colombia, Peru and Uruguay, and their somewhat less successful efforts to establish good relations with Argentina and Chile in the Southern Cone.Footnote ¹⁸ Brazil preferred to underline its close relations with Europe, especially Britain and, to a lesser extent, Germany, and now increasingly with the United States. For Brazilians there were two giants – though unequal giants, no doubt – in the western hemisphere: the United States and Brazil. Both were continental in size; both had huge natural resources and economic potential; both were stable ‘democracies’ (sic); and both were, above all, different from América Espanhola/América Latina. Brazil also recognised the great changes – geopolitical, economic and cultural – that were taking place in the world on the eve of the twentieth century. US global hegemony would inevitably replace that of Britain and Europe more generally. It was in Brazil's interests to strengthen its ties with the United States. Here was the beginning of the americanização of Brazilian foreign policy associated especially with the Barão do Rio Branco, the foreign minister between 1902 and 1912, and Joaquim Nabuco, the ambassador in Washington from 1905 until 1910. The United States was regarded not only as offering the best defence against European imperialism, which for Brazil remained a greater threat than US imperialism, but as providing order, peace and stability in Latin America – that is to say, in Spanish America. Brazilian governments, unlike most Spanish American governments, were not critical of the United States over the war with Spain in 1898, approved of the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, turned a blind eye to the various US interventions in Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, and gave their full support to the United States at all the Pan-American conferences.Footnote ¹⁹

During the First World War, Brazil, alone among the leading countries of the region, followed the United States in declaring war on Germany in 1917. Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Chile and Argentina, in contrast, remained neutral throughout. Brazil alone, with the support of the United States, was elected a non-permanent member of the Council of the League of Nations. After its withdrawal from the League in 1926, Brazil focused even more on its relations with the United States, which had by now replaced Britain as Brazil's principal commercial partner – that is to say, the principal supplier of manufactured and capital goods to Brazil (the United States had always been the major importer of coffee, Brazil's principal export) – and which was challenging Britain as Brazil's principal source of foreign investment, both portfolio and direct. During the 1930s, despite some interest in the new Germany, Brazil's relationship with the United States remained the central pillar of Brazilian foreign policy. And during the Second World War, Brazil was for the United States by far the most strategically important of its southern neighbours, providing air bases in Belém, Natal and Recife for the war in North Africa, supplying rubber and a wide range of minerals crucial to the war effort, and finally sending a Força Expedicionária Brasileira (FEB) of some 25,000 troops to join the Allied forces in Italy.Footnote ²⁰

Spanish American and Brazilian Intellectuals from the 1880s to the 1930s

Spanish American intellectuals in the period from the 1880s to the Second World War were generally hostile to the United States, to US imperialism, to US culture, and to pan-Americanism. The catalyst was undoubtedly Cuba and the Spanish–American War of 1898.Footnote ²¹ The idea of two Americas – on the one hand the United States, and on the other Spanish America, Hispanoamérica, América Latina, now frequently called ‘Nuestra América’, which was different from, and superior to, Anglo-Saxon America (Anglo-Saxon utilitarianism and materialism were compared unfavourably to Latin humanism and idealism) – was developed further by Spanish Caribbean writers such as Eugenio María de Hostos (Puerto Rico, 1839–1903) and José Martí (Cuba, 1853–95). Martí's articles from Washington in 1889–90 and from New York between 1891 and 1895 were published in La Revista Ilustrada (New York), El Partido Liberal (Mexico City) and La Nación (Buenos Aires).Footnote ²² The idea is most evident, however, in the writings of the Uruguayan, José Enrique Rodó (1871–1917), whose Ariel (Montevideo, 1900) and Mirador de Próspero (Montevideo, 1913) had an enormous impact on an entire generation, and particularly the young, throughout Spanish America (Ariel was dedicated to ‘the youth of America’). Rodó warned against ‘el peligro yanqui’, which was social, cultural and moral even more than economic and political, and what he called ‘nordomanía’, which undermined ‘el espíritu de los americanos latinos’. Also widely read was the Colombian, José Maria Vargas Vila (1860–1933), whose Ante los bárbaros, first published in Rome in 1900, had many later, expanded editions with different subtitles (for example, El yanqui, he ahi el enemigo) before a definitive edition appeared in Barcelona in 1923.

For some Spanish American intellectuals of this generation it became more common, particularly once slavery had been abolished in Brazil in 1888, followed by the overthrow of the Empire in 1889, to point to the similarities between Brazil and Spanish America in, for example, culture, religion, political structures, law and racial mixture. The term ‘Iberoamérica’ was frequently used to refer to both Spanish and Portuguese America. Like their predecessors in the 1850s and 1860s, however, few of these intellectuals showed any real interest in Brazil. A rare exception was Martín García Merou (1862–1905), the Argentine minister in Brazil (1894–6) and then in the United States (1896–1905), who in 1897 wrote a series of articles on Brazilian intellectual, cultural and literary life for the journal La Biblioteca in Buenos Aires. These were later published as El Brasil intelectual: impresiones y notas literárias (Buenos Aires, 1900). The great majority continued to exclude Brazil from what they thought of as ‘Nuestra América’ or ‘América Latina’. The classic studies of Spanish America's deficiencies by those who, under the influence of social Darwinism, were pessimistic about its future had, of course, nothing to say about Brazil.Footnote ²³

An Argentine, Manuel Baldomero Ugarte (1875–1951), was perhaps the first Spanish American intellectual specifically to make the case for the inclusion of Brazil in ‘América Latina’, ‘la nación latinoamericana’, ‘la parte superior del continente’, united in opposition to US imperialism. In his early writings – for example, El porvenir de América Latina: la raza, la integridad territorial y moral, la organización interior (Valencia, 1910; 2nd edition, Mexico, 1918), which in some editions appeared with the title El porvenir de América española – and in his many speeches in Barcelona, Paris, New York, Mexico City and throughout South America in the period 1910–17, published as Mi campaña hispano-americana (Barcelona, 1922), Ugarte's primary concern was Spanish America. A lecture he gave at Columbia University in July 1912 entitled ‘The Future of Latin America’ (published in Spanish as ‘Los pueblos del Sur ante el imperialismo norteamericano’), however, did include references to Brazil. And in Un destino de un continente (Madrid, 1923; English trans. The Destiny of a Continent, New York, 1925), Ugarte argued that Brazil was simply ‘a special variant ‘ of ‘La Gran España’ and must be considered and treated as ‘an integral part our family of nations [América Latina]’, all with their roots in the ‘península hispánica’. There could be no such thing, Ugarte insisted, as ‘partial Latin Americanism’.Footnote ²⁴

There was no great change in the attitude of most Spanish American intellectuals towards Brazil in the 1920s and 1930s. Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre (Peru, 1895–1979) promoted the idea of ‘Indoamérica’ rather than ‘América Latina’ in, for example, ¿A dónde va Indoamérica? (Santiago, 1935), so as to include Spanish America's Indian populations as well as its mestizos and blacks. And José Carlos Mariátegui (Peru, 1895–1930) wrote about ‘América Indo-Ibérica’ in Temas de nuestra América, a collection of articles published between 1924 and 1928. But whether the preferred expression was ‘Indoamérica’, ‘América Indo-Ibérica’ or ‘América Latina’, Brazil for the most part remained excluded.

There were some exceptions. José Vasconcelos (Mexico, 1882–1959), for example, in his essay ‘El problema del Brasil’ (Mexico City, 1921), argued for the integration of such a future great country with the other republics of the hemisphere. He headed the Mexican mission to Brazil for the celebration of the centenary of Brazilian independence in 1922, and his major work, La raza cósmica (Barcelona, 1925), originated as the introduction to his report on his journey to Brazil (and Argentina), which he called his ‘misión de la raza ibero-americana’. The first and most famous chapter, ‘El mestizaje’, was inspired by what he learned of miscegenation in Brazil. A later work, Bolivarismo y Monroismo: temas ibero-americanos (Santiago de Chile, 1934), however, opens with the words: ‘Llamaremos bolivarismo al ideal hispanoamericano de crear una federación con todos los pueblos de cultura española. Llamaremos monroismo al ideal anglosajón de incorporar las veinte naciones hispánicas al Imperio nórdico, mediante la política del panamericanismo’. Vasconcelos advocated ‘México para los mexicanos, Hispanoamérica para los hispanoamericanos’, and expressed his fear that Brazil was not on the side of Spanish America against the United States and had its own expansionist/imperialist ambitions, about which the countries of Spanish South America should be concerned. He was particularly outraged that Brazil had dedicated a prominent public building in Rio de Janeiro to President Monroe.Footnote ²⁵

Vasconcelos had a great influence on another leading Mexican intellectual, Alfonso Reyes, who was named ambassador to Brazil in 1930. During the following six or seven years Reyes wrote more than 50 perceptive essays on Brazilian literature and culture.Footnote ²⁶ Reyes was, however, another exception; Spanish American writers, literary critics and intellectuals in general continued to show little interest in Brazil. They focused on their own national identities and cultures, and beyond this, their concern was Hispanic or Latin American culture – that is to say, Spanish American culture, separate and different from that of the United States, and of Brazil. An outstanding example is Pedro Henríquez Ureña (1884–1946), who was born in the Dominican Republic but spent much of his life in Mexico, Cuba and Argentina, and whose later works included Literary Currents in Hispanic America (Cambridge MA, 1945), based on the Charles Eliot Norton lectures he delivered at Harvard in 1940–1, and La historia de la cultura en la América hispánica (Mexico City, 1947), published after his death. Neither included Brazil.

The leading Brazilian intellectuals during the First Republic had markedly different attitudes to the United States and to pan-Americanism.Footnote ²⁷ Those who were predominantly hostile saw some advantage in solidarity and collaboration with Brazil's Spanish American neighbours, but despite a somewhat greater degree of interaction with their Spanish American counterparts and a greater awareness of the economic and political progress achieved by some Spanish American republics, especially Argentina, Uruguay and Chile, most viewed Spanish America in an overwhelmingly negative light. Few had any real interest in, and fewer still identified with, ‘América Latina’, ‘Nuestra América’ or ‘Iberoamérica’, much less ‘Indoamérica’.

In A ilusão americana (São Paulo, 1893; 2nd edition, Paris, 1895), Eduardo Prado (1860–1901) strongly condemned the territorial conquest and economic exploitation of Spanish America by the United States, its arrogant diplomacy and its use of military force. But he was also, as a monarchist, contemptuous of the Spanish American republics and sceptical of their capacity to unite against their common enemy. As for pan-Americanism, ‘a fraternidade americana é uma mentira’. Prado was an early exponent of the idea of Brazil as ‘uma imensa ilha’, a continent in itself. He claimed to have been told by geologists that the Río de la Plata and the Amazon were once connected. In any event, Brazil was separated from the Spanish American republics by ‘diversidade da orígem e da língua’, and ‘nem o Brasil fisico, nem o Brasil moral formam um sistema com aquelas nações’.

In Panamericanismo (Monroe, Bolivar, Roosevelt) (Paris, 1907), based on articles written for O Diário de Pernambuco and O Estado de São Paulo between 1903 and 1907, Manuel de Oliveira Lima (1867–1928) also opposed pan-Americanism, which he saw as an attempt to ‘latinise Monroism’ and promote US ‘hegemonia hemisférica’, and what he termed ‘rooseveltismo’ (‘a edição última do monroismo’). In Impressões da América espanhola (Rio de Janeiro, 1907), however, based on articles written mainly in Venezuela and Argentina and published in O Estado de São Paulo between 1904 and 1906, he also revealed a somewhat negative view of ‘América Latina’, ‘os países latinos do continente’. And in América latina e América inglesa: a evolução brasileira comparada com a hispano-americana e com a anglo-americana (Rio de Janeiro, undated [1913]; English trans. The Evolution of Brazil Compared with that of Spanish and Anglo-Saxon America, 1914), based on six lectures delivered at Stanford University in October 1912, he elaborated his view that Brazil and Spanish America were separate ‘and frequently hostile’ civilisations, although he argued the case for their collaboration against the United States.

In his correspondence with Foreign Minister Rio Branco and with various Brazilian intellectuals and friends while he was ambassador in Washington, and, above all, in his lectures at US universities, Joaquim Nabuco (1849–1910) showed himself to be a great admirer of the United States and an enthusiastic supporter of pan-Americanism.Footnote ²⁸ For Nabuco, Eduardo Prado's A ilusão americana was ‘a little book which hurts us a great deal’, as he wrote to José Pereira da Graça Aranha. ‘[It] entertains in the public spirit a mistrust of that country [the United States], our only possible ally’.Footnote ²⁹ There were two pathways that Brazil could follow, he wrote to Rio Branco: ‘the American and the other, which I don't know whether to call Latin American, independent or solitary (solitário). For my part, I am frankly monroist (francamente monroista)’Footnote ³⁰. ‘In America (if it were not for any other reason than language, which isolates us from the rest of Ibero-America as it separates Portugal from Spain)’, he wrote to Alexandre Barbosa Lima, ‘we cannot hesitate between the United States and Spanish America’.Footnote ³¹ He viewed the ascendancy of the United States in the American continent as ‘natural’ and generally beneficial, a view that ended his friendship with Oliveira Lima, a fellow pernambucano. He was less than enthusiastic about Spanish America, which, except for Chile, he saw as a region still characterised by anarchy, civil war and caudillismo, although in the interests of pan-Americanism a rapprochement between Brazil and Spanish America was essential.Footnote ³²

Manoel Bomfim (1868–1932) offered, at least for a while, a discordant voice. In A América Latina: males de orígem (Rio de Janeiro, 1905), written in Paris in 1903, he criticised pan-Americanism, which for him simply meant ‘dominação norteamericana’. He was also critical of the predominantly negative view of Latin America (that is to say, Spanish America) in the United States and Europe, however. Latin America was generally portrayed as backward and barbarous in order, he said, to facilitate its domination and exploitation, and he defended the idea of ‘fraternidade’ and ‘solidaridade’ between Brazil and Spanish America based on ‘uma homogeneidade de sentimentos’. Twenty years later, however, in O Brasil na América: caracterização da formação brasileira (Rio de Janeiro, 1929), mostly written in 1925, he, too, had become disillusioned with Spanish America. ‘América Latina’ was no more than ‘uma designação geográfica’ within which there were unbridgeable historical, cultural and political differences between, on the one hand, Brazil, and on the other, ‘os chamados latino-americanos’, ‘os neo-castelhanos’, ‘os outros neo-ibéricos’. The opening chapter of O Brasil na América is entitled, significantly, ‘Portugal heróica’, and the final chapter ‘Diferenças entre os neo-ibéricos’.

The journalist and literary critic José Veríssimo (1857–1916) was a rare example of a Brazilian intellectual who, in works such as A educação nacional (Belém, 1890; 2nd edition, Rio de Janeiro, 1906) and ‘A regeneração da América Latina’ (Jornal do Comercio, 18 December 1900, later included in Homens e coisas estrangeiras, Rio de Janeiro, 1902), deplored US economic and political imperialism and US cultural influence in Spanish America (in this he is often compared with Rodó), but also in Brazil. At the same time, he was negative in his attitude to the Spanish American republics and showed little sympathy with the idea of ‘confraternidade latinoamericana’. Yet he believed ‘Hispanoamericanos também somos nós, pois Portugal é Espanha’. He also deplored the dominant view in Brazil that Brazilian intellectual life as well as Brazilian literature and culture was superior to that of Spanish America.Footnote ³³ On a visit to the Academia Brasileira de Letras in 1912, the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío heard Veríssimo lament the fact that ‘filhos do mesmo continente, quase da mesma terra, oriundos de povos em suma da mesma raça ou pelo menos da mesma formação cultural, com grandes interesses comuns, vivemos nós, latinoamericanos, pouco mais que alheios e indiferentes uns aos outros, e nos ignorando quase por completo’.Footnote ³⁴

In 1909 the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Relations (commonly known as Itamaraty) created and financed a journal, Revista Americana, whose aim was to deepen political and cultural interchange between Brazil, Latin America and the United States.Footnote ³⁵ This lasted for a decade, until 1919. It published contributions in Spanish as well as Portuguese, including articles by Spanish Americans critical of Brazilian foreign policy, especially Brazil's close relations with the United States, and pan-Americanism. The majority of the articles, however, were by Brazilians sympathetic to both. The first article in the first issue of Revista Americana was a translation of Nabuco's lecture, ‘The Share of America in Civilization’, read at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in June 1909 (Nabuco being by this time too ill to deliver it himself).

After the First World War there was certainly more interest in Spanish American literature and culture among Brazilian intellectuals and writers, and more cultural interchange. Mário de Andrade (1893–1945), for example, maintained a regular correspondence with Jorge Luis Borges in Buenos Aires, though he confessed in one of these letters that he had a ‘horror de essa história de América Latina muito agitado hoje em dia’.Footnote ³⁶ Ronald de Carvalho (1893–1935) welcomed José Vasconcelos on his visit to Rio in 1922 and accepted an invitation to lecture on Brazilian literature in Mexico the following year. Like many of the modernists of the 1920s, however, Carvalho had a stronger sense of belonging to America as a whole – the Americas – than to América Latina. His most famous poem, Toda a América (Rio de Janeiro, 1924), which the novelist Antônio Olinto called ‘poema de um continente’, was influenced more by Walt Whitman than by any Spanish American poet.

Brazilian intellectuals between the wars, like Spanish American intellectuals, were interested principally in the formation of their own national identity. The idea of Brazil, the roots of Brazil (indigenous peoples, the Portuguese, Africans) and Brazil's racial, social and cultural miscegenation, were the main concerns of, for example, José Francisco de Oliveira Viana in Evolução do povo brasileira (São Paulo, 1923) and Raça e assimilação (São Paulo, 1932); Manoel Bomfim in O Brasil na história (São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, 1930) and O Brasil nação: realidade da soberania brasileira (2 vols., Rio de Janeiro, 1931); Gilberto Freyre in Casa grande e senzala (Rio de Janeiro, 1933) and Sobrados e mucambos (São Paulo, 1936); Sergio Buarque de Holanda in Os raízes do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 1936); and Caio Prado Jr. in Evolução política do Brasil (São Paulo, 1933) and Formação do Brasil contemporâneo: colônia (São Paulo, 1942). The government of Getúlio Vargas (1930–45), especially during the Estado Novo (1937–45), when Gustavo Capanema was minister of education and public health, with responsibility also for culture, used the state and intellectuals linked to the state – for example, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Mário de Andrade, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Rodrigo Melo Franco de Andrade, Lúcio Costa and Oscar Neimeyer – to promote a Brazilian national identity. Spanish America, ‘América Latina’, was still seen as ‘a outra América’.Footnote ³⁷

At the same time, an increasing emphasis was also placed on Brazil's American identity (‘brasilidade americanista’) during the Second World War. From August 1941 until February 1948 the official newspaper of the Estado Novo, A Manhã, ‘o veículo de brasilidade’, published a Sunday supplement with the title Pensamento da América, which promoted an interest in contemporary literary, intellectual and cultural currents in ‘todas as Américas’, including Spanish America and the United States, in an ‘espírito pan-americano’. Cassiano Ricardo, the editor of A Manhâ, regarded the American continent as consisting of 21 ‘repúblicas irmãs’ (Canada, as always, was excluded). ‘Há vinte e uma maneiras de ser americano, e não uma apenas’, he insisted. Brazil and the United States were ‘duas áncoras prendendo um só continente’.Footnote ³⁸ One of Brazil's leading historians, Pedro Calmon, author of Brasil e América: história de uma política (Rio de Janeiro, 1943), which celebrated ‘união continental’ to save humanity and civilisation from fascism, was a principal collaborator, along with the US historian William Spence Robertson, in a multi-volume História de las Américas (the United States, Spanish America and Brazil) under the general editorship of the Argentine historian Ricardo Levene (14 vols., Buenos Aires, 1940/1942; Portuguese edition, São Paulo, 1945).

The United States, Brazil and ‘Latin America’ from the 1920s to the Cold War

When did Brazil finally become part of ‘América Latina’? When ‘América Latina’ became ‘Latin America’ – that is to say, when the United States, and by extension Europe and the rest of the world, began to regard Brazil as an integral part of a region called Latin America, beginning in the 1920s and 1930s but especially during the Second World War and the Cold War, and when at the same time Spanish American governments and intellectuals began to include Brazil in their concept of ‘América Latina’, and when even some (albeit few) Brazilians began to identify with Latin America.

As early as the 1890s, the term ‘Latin America’ can be found in official US documents referring to reciprocal trade treaties with the countries south of the Río Grande, including Brazil. In his instructions to the US delegates to the second Pan-American Conference in Mexico City in 1901, President Roosevelt expressed the desire of the United States to be the friend of ‘all the Latin American republics’.Footnote ³⁹ In 1909 President Taft's secretary of state, Philander Knox, charged the first assistant secretary of state, Francis M. Huntington Wilson, with the task of enlarging and reorganising the State Department. For the first time regional divisions were created, including a Division of Latin American Affairs, though in practice it dealt only with Mexico, the Caribbean and Central America; it showed no great interest in South America.Footnote ⁴⁰ The expression ‘Latin America’, however, was still not widely used before the First World War. The research of João Feres Jr. has revealed that neither the Library of Congress nor the New York Public Library has a single book, journal or periodical in English with ‘Latin America’ in its title published before 1900; only two titles were found in the Library of Congress published between 1900 and 1910, and 23 in the decade between 1911 and 1920.Footnote ⁴¹

In 1916–17 there was an interesting debate among a group of historians in the United States about what name to give the first academic journal devoted to the history of the countries to the south, which was due to be launched in January 1918. After two initial choices containing the words ‘Ibero-America’ and ‘Latin America’ respectively were found unacceptable, the latter in part because at the time it signified Spanish America only, it was finally decided, by six votes to one, to call the journal the Hispanic American Historical Review. Hispania (from the Roman era), it was argued, referred to the peninsula, and therefore to Spain and Portugal and by extension to both Spanish America and Brazil.Footnote ⁴² In the first issue of another journal launched in 1918, Hispania, devoted to the language and literature of Spain and Portugal, its editor Aurelio M. Espinosa, a Stanford professor, denounced the use of the term ‘Latin America’ to refer to the region south of the United States, including Brazil, as ‘improper, unjust, unscientific’. The only appropriate names were Spanish America (sic) or Hispanic America.Footnote ⁴³ In 1926 the American Historical Association established the Conference on Hispanic American History (renamed the Conference on Latin American History only in 1938). In 1939 Lewis Hanke, creator and editor of The Handbook of Latin American Studies, an annual annotated bibliography of books and articles on Spanish America and Brazil, first published in 1935, became the head of a new division of the Library of Congress devoted to Portugal, Spain and Latin America which was named the Hispanic Foundation (now Hispanic Division).

The first general history of Latin America, including Brazil, published in the United States was William Spence Robertson's The History of the Latin-American Nations (New York, 1922). Robertson was professor of history at the University of Illinois, where he had been teaching the history of Latin America since 1909. In the preface to his book, Rise of the Spanish-American Republics as Told in the Lives of their Liberators (New York, 1918), he had written of the origins, as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, of his desire to study ‘the history and politics of Hispanic America, the vast region inhabited by the wayward children of Spain and Portugal’.Footnote ⁴⁴ The purpose of his new book, he wrote, was ‘to outline the chief events in the history of Latin America or, as it is sometimes called, Hispanic America’ – the history of all the ‘nations which sprang from the colonies of Spain and Portugal’Footnote ⁴⁵. Herman G. James and Percy A. Martin's The Republics of Latin America: Their History, Governments and Economic Conditions (New York, 1923) included a chapter on Brazil. Martin had been professor of history at Stanford since 1908. He was, like Robertson, one of the co-founders of the Hispanic American Historical Review, as well as the translator of Oliveira Lima's Stanford lectures, and considered himself something of a ‘Brazilianist’. Another early US ‘Latinamericanist’ whose interests included Brazil was J. Fred Rippy, who edited and wrote the introduction to Manuel Ugarte's Destiny of a Continent (New York, 1925).

It was in the late 1920s, in the aftermath of the disastrous 1928 Pan-American Conference in Havana – which highlighted the alarmingly poor state of the United States' relations with its neighbours, now including those in South America, where US trade and investments had grown considerably since the First World War – that official thinking in Washington and US foreign policy began to focus more seriously on Latin America. This included all 20 republics south of the Río Grande, including Brazil, despite warnings from Edwin V. Morgan, the US ambassador in Brazil for more than 20 years (1912–33), that too many in Washington were inclined to group Brazil with the ‘South American powers of Spanish origin’. ‘This country’, he told Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg, ‘never forgets’ that it is ‘of Portuguese and not Spanish origin’, that like the United States it is ‘built on non-Spanish foundations’, and that it has a special political and economic relationship with the United States different from that of the Spanish American republics.Footnote ⁴⁶

In the 1930s, with the United States facing an external threat not only to its economic but also to its geopolitical interests in Latin America from the emerging fascist powers of Europe (Germany in particular was seen as a threat to Argentina, Chile and, above all, Brazil), the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt responded with the Good Neighbor policy towards Latin America. As the situation in Europe deteriorated, pan-American or inter-American solidarity, the unity of the hemisphere, the United States and Latin America standing together in the worldwide struggle of democracy against fascism, became ever more important. From August 1940 and throughout the Second World War the Office for the Coordination of Commerce and Cultural Relations between the American Republics (renamed the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, OCIAA, in 1941), under the direction of Nelson Rockefeller, formulated and executed a programme aimed at winning the hearts and minds of Latin Americans, through cinema, radio, music and the printed word. Many more books were now published on Latin America – over 150 in the 1940s, including Hubert Herring's Good Neighbors: Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Seventeen Other Countries (New Haven CT, 1941), Latin America (New York, 1942) by the geographer Preston E. James, Samuel Flagg Bemis' The Latin American Policy of the United States (New York, 1943), The Green Continent: A Comprehensive View of Latin America by its Leading Writers, edited by the Colombian writer German Arciniegas and translated from the Spanish and Portuguese by Harriet de Onis et al. (New York, 1944), and the high school textbook by Harriet M. Brown and Helen B. Miller, Our Latin American Neighbors (New York, 1944). All included Brazil as an integral part of Latin America.Footnote ⁴⁷ And beginning with Karl Loewenstein's Brazil under Vargas (New York, 1942) and culminating with Samuel Putnam's translations of Jorge Amado, Euclides da Cunha and Gilberto Freyre, together with his Marvellous Journey: A Survey of Four Centuries of Brazilian Writing (New York, 1948), many more books were published on Brazil itself, which was finally receiving attention as the most important country, and the most important ally of the United States, in Latin America.

The emergence of the United States as a global power during and after the Second World War led to a demand for more expertise for military and political strategic planning. During the war a so-called Ethnogeographic Board was created, bringing together specialists from the National Research Council, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council and the Smithsonian Institution, to provide a structure around which to organise policy and through which to develop education and research.Footnote ⁴⁸ The Board began by dividing up the world into continents, with one important exception: instead of the western hemisphere or the Americas or North and South America, there was to be the United States and Latin America. When the Board later moved to dividing the world into regions with a degree of geographical, geopolitical and cultural homogeneity, Latin America presented itself as one of the most cohesive in terms of religion, language and culture, history, and economic, social and political structures. The differences between Spanish America and Brazil in all these respects, except to some extent religion, and the huge disparities in size and population between Brazil and all the other countries in the region, except perhaps Mexico, were simply ignored.Footnote ⁴⁹

In the immediate post-war period and the early years of the Cold War, the official US view that the 20 republics south of the Río Grande, including Brazil, constituted ‘Latin America’ influenced other governments, multilateral institutions (the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America, ECLA/CEPAL, established in 1948, was the first international organisation responsible for ‘Latin America’), NGOs, foundations, learned societies and, not least, universities in both the United States and Europe, where ‘Latin American Studies’ experienced a rapid growth that accelerated further after the Cuban Revolution.Footnote ⁵⁰ Latin America as a whole, now including Brazil, was not only seen as different from the United States, but also as a problem area, part of what was now called the ‘Third World’ – economically, socially and culturally backward, politically violent and unstable. In his theory of the ‘clash of civilizations’ Samuel P. Huntington was to argue that Latin America, with Brazil its ‘leading state’, was a ‘separate civilization’, with a ‘distinct identity which differentiates it from the West’.Footnote ⁵¹

For the US government Latin America in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War was important for both economic (trade and investment) and geopolitical (security) reasons, not least because it initially represented the biggest single voting bloc in the UN General Assembly. With the onset of the Cold War, however, hemispheric concerns increasingly gave way to global concerns. Europe, the Middle East and Asia became more important than Latin America, the one region of the world in which the Soviet Union did not apparently pose a significant challenge to US hegemony. The United States could afford to neglect Latin America. The OCIAA was closed in May 1946, and there was to be no economic development aid, no Marshall Plan, for Latin America: ‘There has been a Marshall Plan for the Western Hemisphere for a century and a half’, Truman declared at a press conference in Washington in August 1947; ‘It is known as the Monroe Doctrine.’Footnote ⁵² As early as 1949, Adolf Berle, who had served as assistant secretary of state for Latin America in the Roosevelt administration and ambassador to Brazil in 1945–6, complained about the ‘sheer neglect and ignorance’ of the region he found in Washington. ‘We have simply forgotten about Latin America’, he stated.Footnote ⁵³ The Cuban Revolution led directly to President Kennedy's proposal in 1961 for an Alliance for Progress to advance Latin America's economic and social development. Once the Cuban missile crisis had been peacefully resolved and the immediate external threat to its interests removed, however, the United States was able, relatively speaking, to neglect Latin America once again – though it remained ready to intervene, directly or indirectly, to deal with any internal threat and to save Latin America from ‘communism’, as it claimed to do, for example, in Brazil in 1964, Chile in 1973 and Central America in the 1980s.

In view of the special relationship, if not unwritten alliance, that it had enjoyed with the United States since the beginning of the century and the support that it had given during the Second World War, Brazil was disappointed to be treated by the United States after the war as simply one of 20 Latin American republics, albeit the biggest and perhaps the most important. Brazil was afforded no special role in the post-war global order – in particular, no permanent seat on the UN Security Council – and received no special economic development assistance.Footnote ⁵⁴ Although, in the last analysis, Brazil was always on the side of the United States and the ‘West’ in the Cold War, a more independent foreign policy emerged under President Vargas, who in 1951 rejected a US request to send Brazilian troops to Korea at the head of an inter-American force.Footnote ⁵⁵ This independence became more marked under Presidents Quadros and Goulart (1961–4), whose política externa independente included the restoration of relations with the Soviet Union (broken in 1947) and closer relations with China and the rest of the underdeveloped ‘Third World’, including the countries of Africa and Asia, in their struggles against colonialism. It also included closer relations with revolutionary Cuba, though not, significantly, with the other Spanish American countries.Footnote ⁵⁶

While the United States regarded Brazil as a ‘key country’ in world affairs and its preferred partner in the Latin American region during the 21-year military dictatorship that followed the US-supported military coup of 1964, Brazil, especially during the Médici and Geisel administrations (1969–79), was frequently in a state of low-level conflict with the United States, over trade and nuclear power, for example. Although it never joined the Non-Aligned Movement (it had observer status only), it pursued independent ‘Third World’ policies often at odds with US interests and policies in, for example, the Middle East and southern Africa.Footnote ⁵⁷ As one US Treasury official crudely put it in 1970, Brazil under the military was anxious ‘to get out of the banana republic category and play in the big league’.Footnote ⁵⁸ In Latin America, however, where it was clearly now the dominant country (between 1940 and 1980 its population had increased from 40 million to 170 million and its economy had grown at an average rate of 7 per cent per annum, one of fastest rates of economic growth in the world), Brazil had neither the will nor the resources to play a leadership role, and certainly not the role of regional ‘sheriff’ that the US State Department sometimes envisaged.Footnote ⁵⁹ Indeed, Brazil's relations with its closest neighbour and arch-rival, Argentina, reached an historic low in the 1970s over incipient nuclear arms programmes and the Itaipú dam on the River Paraná. Brazil did join the Association for Latin American Integration in 1980, however. And relations with Argentina improved dramatically after democratisation in both countries in the mid-1980s, a rapprochement that eventually led to the Treaty of Asunción (1991) and the creation of the Mercosur trade bloc consisting of Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay (with which Chile and Bolivia later associated themselves). It is fanciful, however, to talk of a latinoamericanização of Brazilian foreign policy in these years. More than 40 years after the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the Cold War, during which Brazil had been regarded and treated by the United States and the rest of the world as part of Latin America, during which Brazil's economic and political development had in many ways followed a similar path to that of at least the major Spanish American republics, and during which the beginning of Brazil's Marcha para Oeste had brought it in closer contact with many of its neighbours, Brazil could still not be said to have a deep engagement with the rest of the region.

Intellectual Exchange between Spanish America and Brazil after the Second World War

In the years after the Second World War there was much greater interchange between Spanish American and Brazilian intellectuals, writers, artists, critics and academics. Those Spanish Americans who thought in terms of Latin America were more prepared to take note of Brazilian ideas, literature and culture in their own work, but for the most part marginally and without great conviction or enthusiasm. No Spanish American intellectual wrote more about Latin America than Leopoldo Zea (Mexico, 1912–2004); Brazil, however, could hardly be said to be treated adequately in any of his books.Footnote ⁶⁰ Notable exceptions were Arturo Torres-Rioseco (Chile, 1897–1971); Emir Rodrigues Monegal (Uruguay, 1921–85), who edited the two-volume Borzoi Anthology of Latin American Literature (New York, 1977), in which Brazil was well represented; Angel Rama (Uruguay, 1926–83); and Eduardo Galeano (Uruguay, 1940–present), author of the best-selling Las venas abiertas de América Latina (Havana, 1971). It is not insignificant that many of those who gave most attention to Brazil taught in departments of Spanish and Portuguese studies at leading universities in the United States – Torres-Rioseco, for example, for over 40 years at the University of California, Berkeley, and Rodrigues Monegal for over 15 years at Yale – and/or belonged to the smaller countries of Latin America.

In Brazil there were also artists, writers and critics who gave much greater attention to Spanish American culture and ideas than hitherto. One of Brazil's greatest poets, Manuel Bandeira, for example, published Literatura hispano-americana in 1949. In the period from the 1960s to the 1980s several leading Brazilian intellectuals, mostly on the Left, even began to self-identify with ‘Latin America’. This was not merely a question of ideological affinity and solidarity with their colleagues in Spanish America during the Cold War. It was often directly a consequence of years spent in exile during the Brazilian military dictatorship in Uruguay (until the coup there in 1973), Chile (until the coup against Allende, also in 1973), Mexico and Venezuela, as well as in various European countries and the United States.Footnote ⁶¹

Fernando Henrique Cardoso wrote (with the Chilean Enzo Faletto) the hugely influential Dependency and Development in Latin America, first published in Spanish by Siglo XXI in Mexico City in 1969.Footnote ⁶² Celso Furtado (1920–2004), who had been trained and influenced by Raúl Prebisch at ECLA/CEPAL in Santiago and had therefore already been to some extent ‘Latinamericanised’, wrote Subdesenvolvimento e estagnação na América Latina (Rio de Janeiro, 1966) and Formação econômica da América Latina (Rio de Janeiro, 1969).Footnote ⁶³ Ruy Mauro Marini (1932–97) and Theotonio dos Santos (1936–present), who were greatly influenced by the German-born ‘Latinamericanist’ André Gunder Frank, author of Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (New York, 1967), wrote numerous books and articles on the theory of dependency as it related to Latin America. The anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro (1922–97) wrote As Américas e a civilização: processo de formação e causa do desenvolvimento cultural desigual dos povos americanos (Rio de Janeiro, 1970), O dilema de América Latina: estruturas de poder e forças insurgentes (Petrópolis, 1978) and, after his return from exile, an essay entitled ‘América Latina: a pátria grande’ (Rio de Janeiro, 1986). A more surprising example of a Brazilian intellectual identifying with Latin America is Gilberto Freyre, who was at the time perhaps Brazil's most internationally recognised intellectual and who was well known for his previous writings on Luso-Brazilian exceptionalism. In an essay, ‘Americanidade e latinidade da América Latina’, published in 1963, Freyre declared, ‘O brasileiro é uma gente hispânica, sua cultura é hispânica – no sentido ibérica … O Brasil é duplamente hispânica (Portugal e a España)’. For him the Latin American countries were all ‘países americano-tropicais’. There existed ‘uma unidade pan-hispânica … uma cultura transnacionalmente panhispânica a que o Brasil pertence.’Footnote ⁶⁴

It is probably fair to say, however, that the majority of Brazilian intellectuals, like most Brazilians, continued to think of ‘Latin America’ as signifying Spanish America, of Brazil as not part of ‘Latin America’ and of themselves as not essentially ‘Latin American’.Footnote ⁶⁵

Brazil and South America since the End of the Cold War

There is one final twist to this story of Brazil's relationship with ‘América Latina’/‘Latin America’.

As a result of the end of the Cold War, the profound changes in world politics that followed, the intensification of the process of globalisation and, not least, fundamental political and economic change in Brazil itself, Brazil's presence and influence in the world has grown significantly, especially under the presidencies of Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995–2003) and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003–10). Brazil has played an increasingly important role in North–South and South–South relations and has been a key player in discussions on a whole range of global issues, including trade, reform of multilateral institutions and climate change. Brazil is considered internationally, along with China and India, as one of the ‘emerging global powers’ in the first half of the twenty-first century.

At the same time, there has been a major development in Brazil's relations with the other states in its region. Brazil has continued to support the work of the Organisation of American States, founded in 1948 at the ninth Pan-American Conference in Bogotá, and its presidents have attended all five Summits of the Americas held since December 1994, while resisting the US agenda for the economic integration of the western hemisphere. Brazil has attended the annual meetings of the Rio Group of Latin American and Caribbean states, founded in 1986, and is now giving its support to the proposed creation of a community of all 32 Latin American and Caribbean states. But Brazil has also, for the first time in its history, actively pursued a policy of engagement, both economic and political, with its immediate neighbours in South America. This was a conscious decision deliberately taken in 1992–3, reinforced by the fact that in 1994 Mexico joined the United States and Canada in ‘North America’. President Cardoso hosted the first summit of South American presidents in Brasília in 2000. At the third summit held in Cusco in December 2004, during the Lula administration, a South American Community of Nations was formed. It consisted of 12 nations, including Guyana and Suriname. At the summit held in Brasília in May 2008 the community became a Union of South American Nations (UNASUR). Improved relations with its South American neighbours and, indeed, the economic and political integration of South America has been the principal focus of Brazilian foreign policy under President Lula. Also for the first time, and with a good deal of hesitancy, uncertainty and ambivalence, Brazil has begun to think of itself as a regional power, not only in its long-term economic and strategic interests but because, it is argued in Itamaraty, regional power is a necessary condition for global power. The region in question, however, is South America, not Latin America.Footnote ⁶⁶